Britain hardly had a leg to stand on. They got stuck halfway through making the switch. Still use miles in their cars, feet for height, etc.
It's old people. They vote and don't like change.
Everyone in the UK under 40 never used imperial in their education, but everything is still imperial.
Even stuff that's not supposed to be. Milk is sold in pints but labelled in ml. Sometimes it's litres because these are smaller. Timbre is all sold in a metric equivalent, but it isn't consistent. You don't know if the piece you've had delivered is 2.4m or 2.44m. Rulers have both metric and imperial, unless you pay extra for a single system - which makes them harder to use.
The worst thing is recipes, many recipes are imperial online because of the USA. American imperial measurements aren't the same as UK ones.
It is all driven by ignorance. The royal family (TV show) summed this ignorance up best. They complained it took them longer to get to the destination because their sat nav was in kilometres and there's more kilometres than miles so everything is further away.
I'm European but I have a set of US cups in my kitchen because most recipes are in these stupid American measurements.
Making fun for STILL using it. If our navy would navigate by the stars at night, it would be laughed at, right? And rightly so. ;)
GPS can be jammed, try jamming stars.
Who would win:
Urban areas with huge light pollution: "and I took that personally"
Land navies hate this.
Light polution, checkmate astronomer
Dont the British weigh things with rocks or some dumb shit?
They're actually finely calibrated stones. For instance, my weight is 13 stones and a packet of gravel.
Beard, ma'am? Finest in Jerusalem
The British have a perfectly logical system that results in us buying fuel by the litre, measuring speed in miles per hour, and measuring fuel economy in miles per gallon. We are doing just fine thank you very much.
Knowledge is power. Using all of the knowledge at once is surely the most powerful.
FYI: The US doesn't use Imperial, they use US Customary. Volumes are different. Troy weights are usually called Troy (ounces).
Is that supposed to be better?
No it's worse, because they use the same names for different volumes and weights.
But the UK still uses imperial. I remember playing euro truck sim and being annoyed that the road signs don't match the speed limit shown in the GPS. I first thought this was a bug. Then I remembered that I was in UK and not the Netherlands where I picked up the delivery.
UK is a conplete chaos between the two. You buy liters of milk but gallons of gas. Speeds are in miles per hour. Close distances are in meters, longer ones in miles. I have seen weight both in grams and in pounds. And then the currency is even called pound.
"How many pounds does one pound of apples cost, sir?"
It's so much worse than anyone outside of the UK can imagine. Milk and beer come in pints but water and wine come in litres (actually, wine and liquor sometimes comes in centilitres which is actually worse) . Most fuel pumps show you the quantity in litres but we still measure speed in miles per hour and efficiency in miles per gallon.
I know my own weight in kilos but my height in feet. When I go to the barbers I ask for a one mill on the sides and an inch off the top. I try and run a 5k every now and again but could never do a marathon.
Then there's the generation split. I'm of that weird generation where I'm caught in the middle of older teachers knowing imperial better but trying to teach metric in school.
My parents always used imperial so I learned some of that early on but then learned metric in school. Went to engineering college where they taught me all the more advanced metric before going to work at a company that almost exclusively uses imperial (thank you American aerospace for that one)
Shit, even our kettles can't seem to decide on imperial cups or just guessing how big the average mug is. My kettle has both cups and millilitre gradiations on it.
And don't get me started on single, double, king and queen beds! Turns out there's a euro standard and they're not the same as our standard! You can buy a double sheet that's closer to fitting a queen size bed!
Idek what's going on at this point lol
Truly the long game on that joke! Well done, ya got us.
Nah, the brits have it even worse, I don't think even they know what system they use. Like the US just uses the imperial system but brits use like every system randomly plus some stuff that no one else uses, like boulders or some caveman shit like that.
Also brits got like nothing left to make fun of at this point: They fucked their healthcare system bad enough they may as well be in the US, they got 2 viable parties that are even more the same than the US and they left the one thing that kept the country economically relevant to name a few things.
Depends what you mean by fucked up. Long waits for some NHS treatments, but if I get any kind of serious injury like cuts or broken bones, it'll be seen in A&E (Accident & Emergency) at the hospital, they obviously treat the more serious injuries first, but I've never waited longer than 4 hours - and that was on a Saturday night about ten years ago, with a minor cut than only needed 5 stitches or so...
As a kid, my broken arm and the few times I needed stitches, it was sorted pretty much straight away or with an hour or two wait. That's probably doubled or tripled nowadays.
Mental health turnaround is not great, as that's through my doctor (the NHS). Although I got treatment for depression a couple of years back, meds (Sertaline) and referral to therapy, after a week or so waiting for an appointment and answering a few waves of questionnaires. A couple of months later, after a lengthy conversation with a medical health triage nurse, I went on an 18 month waiting list for the ADHD test, and about the same for ASD as well.
Not great, but they're understandably swamped with the spike of mental illness, or people becoming aware of it anyway, after covid and the lockdowns.
Still waiting on the NHS for the ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders) diagnosis, but I actually ended up going private for my ADHD, that was ~£800, was seen in a week, and the meds for that was £100 a month for Elvanse(Vyvanse in the US). I was able to transfer back to my GP after a few months though, so it's just the standard prescription price of £9.65 / month, which is much better.
Other than that last paragraph, everything else was entirely free... so, nah, I don't reckon our health care system is as fucked as yours and we certainly don't have it "even worse"!
Edit: typo's and explaining a few acronyms!
Are they actually using metric though? Last time I was in London airport I wasn't so sure.
When you ask a British person how much they weigh and they start talking about rocks
retains a currency called pounds
Everyone makes fun of the US for using imperial, but nobody makes fun of Liberia and Myanmar for doing the exact same thing.
At least they don't speak Fahrenheit.
"You don't often think of those other two as having their shit together."
--Sterling Archer
Literally no reason not to use metric, idc who or where you are
There is a reason. When you grow up with people around you using imperial units to describe things, you think in terms of it. If you tell me 10 ft., I can picture that in my head, I have an idea of how much that is in real terms. If you tell me 10m, I have no mental idea of how much that is, even if I can convert it. It’s like a language you grow up speaking, versus one you learn later in life.
I do think metric the sole system used in schools, to be honest.
That's true, but it's also a double edged sword: you can easily learn metric just by switching to it.
Try setting a weather widget on your phone to only show you Celsius and don't convert it to Fahrenheit, over time you will get an intuitive understanding of what feels cold to you.
The biggest block to learning a new system is insulating yourself with conversions IMO, imagine trying to learn a new language by just having everyone speak into Google translate
Plenty of people in Canada had no trouble switching back when we did.
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